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The dozen-plus women who caused Tiger to roam? They all like to party, some for pay, and they don’t keep quiet.
The first to surface, Rachel Uchitel, was a former Bloomberg News TV producer and a VIP lounge hostess at Tao Las Vegas. But she had appeared in public before the Woods scandal, in tragic circumstances: A photo of her, distraught and holding a picture of fiance Andrew O’Grady, who worked in the World Trade Center, was published in the New York Post after the September 11, 2001, attacks. The granddaughter of Maurice Uchitel, who owned the renowned El Morocco club, Uchitel continued her family tradition of upscale nightlife hospitality by managing the inner sanctum shenanigans at the VIP lounges of clubs Griffin, Stanton Social, Marquee, Tao Bistro, and Dune in New York, as well as the Pink Elephant in Southampton. Her side project: romancing the rich and famous, including an unnamed baseball player and assorted actors.
After the Woods scandal broke, details rapidly emerged about the full-throttle relationship that involved obsessive sexting and assurances of affection (“Rachel told me, ‘I’m having an affair with Tiger Woods. We’re in love!’,” said affair outer Ashley Samson). Uchitel and her lawyer, Gloria Allred, scheduled a press conference, which was called off at the last minute because, according to CBS News legal analyst (and Allred’s daughter) Lisa Bloom, “Mr. Green has arrived.” In other words, a cash payoff — according to TMZ.com, Uchitel was silenced by a $10 million confidentiality agreement. The pouty star-lover later surfaced in the limelight in even less auspicious surroundings: “Celebrity Rehab,” which she fled, only to promote later.
And all the other women Woods swung with? Shortly before the first anniversary of Woods’s Thanksgiving accident, Loredana Jolie published a tell-all book, “The Real Diary: Lessons from the Good Time Girl to Champion” about her sexual run-ins with the golfer, which were allegedly riddled with three-ways and fantasies about men. Jolie didn’t hold back on Woods’s wife, dubbing her a gold digger because she didn’t seem to care, or know, that Jolie was with Woods in his home.
The second Woods woman to come out, cocktail waitress Jamie Grubbs, was already in the public eye: She had appeared on “Tool Academy.” Her first intimate encounter with Woods came mere days before Nordegren gave birth to the couple’s first child. Other women in Woods’s world share much in common: their work as porn stars. Holly Sampson of “Emmanuelle 2000” claimed she had sex with Woods at his bachelor party but never when he was married. Joslyn James was a Tiger playmate for three years, a liaison recorded by easily savable sexts. Allred found brisk business representing James, who told the New York Daily News that she just wanted “an honest apology. My relationship with Tiger was never about money.” Devon James (no relation to Joslyn) also claimed to have a “dirty,” two-year-plus relationship with Woods.
The rest of Tiger’s lovers were blonde hotties, among them 40-something cougar Theresa Rogers, onetime Penthouse Executive Club dancer Cori Rist, lingerie model (and winner of the “Tiger Woods Mistress Beauty Pageant” on the “Howard Stern Show”) Jamie Jungers.
Any regrets from this outspoken crew? Not from Sampson, James, and Jungers, with a December cocktail party to celebrate the crash heard ’round the world.
Maybe from Uchitel, who told the Daily Mail in November, “I am not the same as the other girls and I never ever imagined in my wildest dreams that I would be caught up in a scandal like this.” As part of her life rehab, she’s studying forensic psychology and getting a professional private detective license. “And yes, that means I will be hunting down cheating husbands … I may as well do something career-wise that I have a flair for.”
–Kimberly Chun
fiction author. cultural anthropologist. journalism advocate.